Bad backlinks are those that point to your website from a questionable source, and having a large number of them can affect your search engine rankings. It is possible for your site to be punished or delisted if the algorithm determines that you used unnatural or questionable methods to gain those links.
- What to Look for in a Bad backlinks
- Directory or forum links of low quality.
- Links from stuff that has been spun and published elsewhere.
- Links that have been exchanged in a link exchange.
- Bad poisonous links can be applied to links generated via 301 redirects.
- Links with exact match anchor text in large quantities.
- The anchor text of links in blog comments should be keyword-rich.
- Links from non-Google-indexed websites.
- Backlinks from other websites that you build only for the aim of generating traffic to your own website.
- Links from websites with low-quality material.
- Links from online pages that have nothing to do with the linked page.
- Footer or sidebar links on other websites.
- These are links that have been paid for but are not marked as sponsored or no-follow.
- A link wheel is a mechanism for generating linkages (site A links to site B that links to site C, etc.)
- Bad link spammers use obfuscation to their advantage by including links in the body text, HTML, or even graphics.
How to Find Bad Backlinks
Bad backlinks can be found in two ways: one is by using a tool like Ahrefs, and the other is by using:
- Using the Google Search Console is a completely free and unautomated procedure. In the “Links Report” section, click the “Top Linking Sites” box to see a full list of the websites that have linked to your domain. Then, one by one, review each site to see if it appears to be a dangerous link.
- This is an automated process that requires a subscription to tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush, which will analyze your backlinks. A bad backlink can be flagged by each of these SEO tools using a function that flags links based on their metrics.
Cleaning Up Your Website
In order to clean up your website’s link profile, you need to follow these five procedures.
- Locate all of the sources of bad backlinks.
- Put links to be removed in a list.
- Send a request to webmasters to remove a link.
- Send Google your disavow file.
- Keep an eye on the petitions for removal.
To understand more about each step in the process of removing bad backlinks leading to your site, consult our comprehensive guide.
Backlinks That Aren’t Working
It is my hope that you found my guide about harmful backlinks useful.
As you’ve learned, there are different kinds of poor links, but the most common are backlinks purchased or obtained in unethical ways in order to affect a website’s position in search engine results.
In the event that your website’s backlink profile is full of low-quality links, you should try to delete them to preserve the integrity of your site.
How to Get Rid of Bad Links
1. Identify Your Negative, Harmful, and Spam Links
Once you know which links aren’t working, you may begin the process of removing them.
It is possible to accomplish this in either of two ways:
- It is possible to review your backlink profile manually by navigating to Google Search Console’s “Links Report” and clicking on the “Top Linking Sites” section to examine each website that links to your site.
- Using an SEO auditing tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush automatically. Bad backlinks are identified by these techniques as having metrics that match their own.
2. List of Links that should be removed from your site.
In order to eliminate bad backlinks from your site, the next step is to create a list of all the links that appear to be spammy.
To keep track of this list, you may either utilize the tagging and tracking aspects of several SEO auditing tools or an Excel or Google Sheet.
3. Send a Request for a Bad Backlink Removal Email
It is important to delete as many low-quality or spammy links as possible from the web before you do anything else, according to Google’s recommendation.
These types of sites frequently employ false identities and/or erroneous email addresses, making it difficult to determine who is in possession of the malicious backlink in your site’s code.
In spite of this, you must still take this step and prove that you’ve attempted to contact the site owner for the removal of the backlink. If you’ve received a manual action penalty from Google in Search Console, you’ll want to keep this record handy.
4. Toxic and Spam Backlinks should be disavowed by Google.
Use Google Disavow Tool to eliminate spam backlinks from your site.
To ensure that Google’s search engine crawlers don’t penalize your site for links from problematic URLs or domains, you can use this advanced tool to discover the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your site.
Unless both of the following are true, Google does not advise disavowing poor links.
- Many low-quality, spammy, or fake links point to your website.
- In addition, a manual action has been taken or will be taken on your site as a result of the links.
This is how to delete bad backlinks from your link profile if your links fall into any of those two categories:
- Assemble your disavowal list in a text file and then upload it to Google.
- Disavow a single URL or domain at a time. A full subdirectory, such as example.com/en/, cannot be ignored.
- For example, domain: example.com can be used to repudiate a domain (or subdomain).
- UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII encoded text files are required.
- txt file extension is required.
- Go to the tool page for disavowing links.
- You must choose the correct property from the property list.
- Upload your list by clicking the button.
- When prompted, select the disavow file on your personal computer.
How Do I Detect Spam Backlinks on My Site?
You need to look at the anchor text of the links heading to your website and the source of those connections in order to identify spam backlinks. Google Search Console’s Link Reports feature or a backlink auditing tool can be used to look for spammy backlinks.
When utilizing Google Search Console to detect and delete spam backlinks, you can find a list of your website’s referring domains by going to the Top Linking Sites part of the tool, as previously described in this post. You can use this tool to check your site for potentially harmful backlinks that could be pointing to it and harming its search engine optimization efforts.